to his body. For a long time
he went to and fro seeking it in vain and fearing that it must have been
killed, and then he found it at the bottom of the shaft in Baker Street,
writhing furiously and cursing with pain. Its leg and an arm and two
ribs had been broken by its fall. Moreover, the evil spirit was angry
because his time had been so short and because of the painmaking violent
movements and casting his body about.

And at that Mr. Bessel returned with redoubled earnestness to the room
where the seance was going on, and so soon as he had thrust himself
within sight of the place he saw one of the men who stood about the
medium looking at his watch as if he meant that the seance should
presently end. At that a great number of the shadows who had been
striving turned away with gestures of despair. But the thought that the
seance was almost over only made Mr. Bessel the more earnest, and he
struggled so stoutly with his will against the others that presently he
gained the woman's brain. It chanced that just at that moment it glowed
very brightly, and in that instant she wrote the message that Doctor
Wilson Paget preserved. And then the other shadows and the cloud of evil
spirits about him had thrust Mr. Bessel away from her, and for all the
rest of the seance he could regain her no more.

So he went back and watched through the long hours at the bottom of
the shaft where the evil spirit lay in the stolen body it had maimed,
writhing and cursing, and weeping and groaning, and learning the lesson
of pain. And towards dawn the thing he had waited for happened, the
brain glowed brightly and the evil spirit came out, and Mr. Bessel
entered the body he had feared he should never enter again. As he did
so, the silence--the brooding silence--ended; he heard the tumult of
traffic and the voices of people overhead, and that strange world that
is the shadow of our world--the dark and silent shadows of ineffectual
desire and the shadows of lost men--vanished clean away.

He lay there for the space of about three hours before he was found. And
in spite of the pain and suffering of his wounds, and of the dim damp
place in which he lay; in spite of the tears--wrung from him by his
physical distress--his heart was full of gladness to know that he was
nevertheless back once more in the kindly world of men.

11. MR. BRISHER'S TREASURE

"You can't be TOO careful WHO you marry," said Mr. Brisher, and pulled
thoughtfully with a